Wait, Do We Need to Wait? Revisiting Budget Forcing for Sequential Test-Time Scaling

In this blog post, we revisit the technique of budget forcing — a sequential test-time scaling technique that controls reasoning budget in reasoning models by appending a "Wait" keyword (or equivalently forcing a stop when the budget is exceeded), thereby determining whether the model continues thinking or directly outputs an answer. We explore three main questions: 1. To what extent does budget-forcing generalize across different model families and settings? 2. Does it work with non-reasoning models? 3. Can other keywords serve the same function as "Wait"? We present experimental results, including cases where budget forcing does and does not help and offer practical guidance for applying budget-forcing in test-time scaling.